LEADER WITHOUT A FOLLOWING.

The Other American
The Life of Michael Harrington
Maurice Isserman
Public Affairs, $28.50, 449 pp.

In the 1980s Michael Harrington occasionally spoke at Friday night meetings at Maryhouse, a Catholic Worker community located on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Critics and admirers alike who gathered around the lectern after the talk to pursue further "clarification of thought" were often invited to call or visit Harrington's office at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) headquarters on Union Square. The same locale that served as the springboard for Dorothy Day's radical journey (as described in her 1938 memoir From Union Square to Rome) was the final stop on Harrington's reverse pilgrimage from Catholic radical to socialist agnostic. Yet Harrington's appearances at Maryhouse reflected his stature as an accessible and generous leader of the American Left.

These qualities of openness and engagement are vividly captured in Maurice Isserman's superb biography of the man whose best-known book, The Other America (1962), was credited with the "discovery" of poverty amid a postwar affluence so widely touted that many believed social injustice had been rendered obsolete.

Harrington grew up in the 1930s in comfortable neighborhoods in the West End of Saint Louis and the adjoining suburb of University City, where his family's middle-class Irish Catholicism and civic-mindedness placed them near the center of a vital community. From the Jesuits at Saint Louis University High School, suggests Isserman, Harrington acquired "a sense of moral gravity" rather than a specific ideological outlook. The child of staunch Democrats, while at The College of the Holy Cross Harrington was for a time enamored of the conservative Republicanism of Ohio Senator Robert Taft. This "Oedipal reaction," as Harrington later described it, was supplanted by a more meaningful encounter with leftist thought during a one-year stint at Yale Law School. As a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, Harrington experienced his initial "indecisive apostasy" from Catholicism, but returned to the church long enough to serve a memorable tour of duty with the New York Catholic Worker in the early 1950s. At nightly sojourns to the White Horse Tavern and on various picket lines he continued to mingle with secular radicals. In 1952, however, he shocked fellow Catholic Workers by dramatically brandishing a membership card in the Young People's Socialist League. When he finally left the Catholic Worker and the church for good, Dorothy Day was reportedly relieved that theology, not a woman, was the issue, though according to Isserman the young Harrington rarely lacked for female companionship as Catholic or socialist.

Harrington's wanderings were not unlike those of many relatively privileged white American males in the postwar decade. Yet Isserman shows how Harrington's quick and agile mind, coupled with his middle-American qualities, propelled him to the forefront of the socialist movement at a time of rather modest competition in the field. Given his charisma and the "evangelical pitch" of his oratory, his success was no surprise, but Isserman also explores "the gulf that had opened between his personal qualities--of which so many people thought so highly--and the character of his politics, which did not inspire the same universal admiration." Harrington showed a great devotion to sectarian infighting, a particularly fruitless occupation for an acolyte of Max Shachtman, leader of one of the numerous splinter groups that fought over the slim socialist pickings of the 1950s. When a younger group of student radicals emerged in the 1960s, the still boyish Harrington was ideally situated to guide them, but leaders of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) failed to pass the Shachtmanites' anti-Communist litmus test. Isserman's detailed treatment of Harrington's struggles with Tom Hayden over drafts of the Port Huron Statement (the historic 1962 manifesto of SDS) is gripping. Harrington's insistence that the young militants were naive about the Soviets was surely accurate, but his residual sectarianism would limit his effectiveness in the New Left during the momentous decade to come.

The Other America, a work driven, according to Isserman, by Harrington's vision that the "alternative America of intellectuals and students and artists and his Greenwich Village neighbors, and the excluded America of the poverty-stricken and the dispossessed could unite in coalition with a democratic labor movement," was also published in 1962. Without mentioning socialism in the text, Harrington offered an analysis of poverty that was both reasoned and impassioned. The book helped to shape the antipoverty agendas of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Harrington himself worked briefly with Sargent Shriver in the planning stages of LBJ's War on Poverty. It was a heady experience for a bohemian Socialist who suddenly became, in the words of Harrington's occasional patron Robert Maynard Hutchins, "the only man ever to get rich off of poverty."

Harrington overcame the psychic toll of success but remained haunted by internecine warfare on the Left. When the Socialist party peevishly tried to sabotage George McGovern's bid for the presidency in 1972, Harrington finally resigned his membership, alleging that "the historic party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas is today doing the work of Richard Nixon." In the 1970s Harrington finally assumed Thomas's role as moral leader of the non-Communist Left, as cofounder of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and its successor, the DSA. Though he never found the mass base for "conscience politics" that he had long sought, Harrington's "moderate, pragmatic radicalism," Isserman argues, exerted real influence within the Democratic party. The Reagan years were another story. Harrington never understood why so many formerly Democratic voters embraced a leader whose policies he believed to be both "insane and cruel." In response the Democrats began their long retreat from issues of deep concern to Harrington, while embracing an "identity politics" with which he was never fully comfortable. Isserman suggests that Harrington's ability to "speak American" was one of this native radical's greatest gifts, yet his unwavering devotion to socialism occasionally limited his recognition of other forms of American discourse--from the utopianism of SDS to Reaganism--that were more appealing to segments of the nation than his own claims.

Maurice Isserman is a leading historian of the American Left who provides the full ideological context for Michael Harrington's socialist journey. He shows how Harrington surmounted the "Old Left" infighting of the 1950s and 1960s--virtually imperceptible to outsiders--to emerge as a revered leader of democratic socialism in the 1970s with a moral authority that assumed international proportions. Isserman also takes Harrington's religious life seriously, treating his apostate Catholicism not as a vestige but as an ongoing source of his humanistic imagination. While undergoing treatment for cancer in 1985, Harrington informed a cousin that after thirty years of atheism "he still deeply loved the Catholic church and found its rituals immensely beautiful and comforting." He claimed that if he died on the operating table and wound up in heaven, "he was going to accuse God face-to-face of mumbling to humankind." Out of such concerns has sprung much theological reflection, but that was simply not Harrington's line of work. In many ways he was a very straightforward person whose fidelity to a political vision shared by relatively few was the measure of his vocation as a witness, if not a prophet.

James T. Fisher teaches American religious history at Saint Louis University. His latest book is Catholics in America (Oxford University Press).